Bill Randall

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I want join the chorus with a pox on the Tokyopop contracts for their “Shining Stars” program, which were issued in “hey dude” language from a company founded by a lawyer.

The “hey dude” language, utterly disingenuous from a corporation, reminds that Tokyopop is essentially a marketing firm: it exists, and has been successful, as an importer of a popular culture wholly created and owned by other people. Its unique contribution has been spin. For instance, when Japanese creators uninterested in other countries’ customs refused to flip their art, Tokyopop released it unflipped and spun it (quite successfully) as “authentic.” No matter one’s flipping preference, it is clear that Tokyopop’s approach stemmed from no principled commitment to authenticity. That matters if you’re interested in a business relationship with the company.

Then recall what Stu Levy, Tokyopop’s founder and CEO, said in Tom McLean’s Bags & Boards interview for Variety:

I was realizing at the time, well we’ve proven our name as Tokyopop, that we can market and we can distribute. But a lot of people, especially in Japan, were treating us like we were a distributor, maybe even like we were an agent.

So I decided that, yeah, it’s important for us to prove that not only can we work with finished product and adapt it, but we can work with creative people and we can express ourselves creatively as well and become more of a studio. … We think we understand the secrets of the success of Japanese manga, and why it resonates worldwide, so let’s take a stab at it.

To put it differently, and simply, if Tokyopop only licenses, packages and redistributes Japanese-owned goods, then it has no company assests. If it loses a few of its top licenses, it could sink the company. The logical step is to own properties, so that their work building the company isn’t wasted. They have already taken this step with OEL manga, in a co-ownership arrangement. Whether these manga are “authentic” or not has given way to the “manga lifestyle,” Levy’s phrase, with the implication that this lifestyle is not (owned by) Japanese.

A paragraph later in that interview, Levy talks about copyright.

…my personal view on how to approach copyright is I really tend to lean towards opening it up and embracing fans expressing themselves creatively with [intellectual property] that other people have created.

This is in the context of fan-made tributes, mash-ups, and dojinshi, and my pointing it out is perhaps unfair. But I would hope that the creators of characters and stories (”intellectual properties”) might have the same consideration as fans and pirates.

Tokyopop does promise co-ownership, vaguely. However, their goal is clearly the development of related properties, like film and television. It brings to mind “Hollywood deals,” “Hollywood contracts,” all shorthand for getting ripped off. I fully admit the bizarre, sleazy Americana of the place and the industry, but at least they have SAG, DGA, WGA, and other assorted unions that ensure things like residuals and health care. Yes, they are very hard to get into, and no, just because you can get SAG rates doesn’t mean you’ll work every day, or even any day, but at least there is a strong institution with leverage in that industry.

Comics creators have no similar institution protecting them. They also don’t have the same barriers of entry into their field. Creating a movie requires piles of money and the cooperation of talented, unionized craftspeople. Comics require pen and paper. The tradeoff in making a movie is that you don’t own it, but it gets made, and you get paid (usually). The tradeoff in comics, in the case of this Tokyopop deal, is a lot less clear. What do you get, their distribution might? From a company who has produced exactly zero breakout hits in OEL manga? In order to consider signing away the rights, I would hope they would offer a hell of a lot more than they are.

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The Hollywood comparison reminds me that Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton both owned and had creative control of their movies (until Keaton signed with MGM and lost both). So everyone in the Bay Area please please please check out the San Francisco Silent Film Festival coming up in July. I wish I could be there to watch The Unknown, The Man Who Laughs, and even– HER WILD OAT!

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Also: if anyone has had good or bad experiences with Tokyopop or other OEL manga publishers, on or off the record, please drop me a line. I’m working on an article that is leaning in that direction, and I’d like to hear from you.

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EDIT: At first glance, it brought to mind the pay-to-play reading fees for contests in literary journals. Except that economics says these journals can’t afford contests without entry fees, as their readership fits in a pickup truck. By contrast, Shining Stars looks like trawling for marketable properties with a very wide net by charging the people who just aren’t good enough.

I misread and then misrepresented this part of the contract about the “pilot fee,” for which I apologize; it is evidence of my non-legal mind and perhaps the fact that “hey dude” is actually just as confusing as legalese.  Fortunately for my credibility, it was not my main argument.

I would still like to hear from OEL manga creators (and publishers) about their experiences.  For the record, it is not a Michael Dean-esque work of investigative reporting; I’m a critic, not a journalist. Normally I just read a bunch of books in context and react; in writing for the first time in several years on the English-language manga industry, it is becoming clear that the context of English manga centers on creators’ rights and licensing.

Dirk at Journalista!, the blog of the magazine I write for, has declared it “Garo Week” after lucking into a copy of the late, lamented, legendary manga anthology for the avant set. I figured I’d join him. He’s posting whole stories, but I’m too lazy for that. Besides, I never like more than half an issue– some artists I revere, others I loathe.

Its covers, however, I love unreservedly. Shonen Magazine had a better run when Tadanori YOKOO took the point, but Garo ran great covers for over 25 years. The last few years sucked, and some of the early ones were hit-and-miss, but the best could make a great coffee-table book. Considering half the artists inside couldn’t really draw, that’s saying something.

I have just a very small collection of Garo, picked up mostly at the Osaka Mandarake when I was on an IGUCHI Shingo kick. I paid less than they cost back in the day. Some I got just for the covers, like this one. More after the jump, from May ‘68 to the mid-90s.

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I’ve been watching the small row about the upcoming Kramers Ergot 7, the influential art-comics anthology. Chris Mautner has the best summary, with his own thoughts; the short version is that it’s an expensive book, so some readers feel priced out. More interesting, others see a tension with comics’ populist roots. At least one person thought art should reach as many people as possible. Others spoke of a need to expand the audience.

I suppose people who can will buy Kramers and the rest will borrow it and conveniently lose touch. But the row raises the question of whom art, any art, should reach.

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First, charging for art is always dicey. Gallery artists know this better than anyone, with wealthy buyers speculating on art like stock options or oil futures. But art is only treated like a commodity; good luck making a living with it. Many artists moonlight: Rimbaud (quit poetry to run guns), Joyce (taught at Berlitz), and half the comics artists now working (drawing spot illos). But the right combination, like a dog and a bald kid, can lead to absurd riches.

I know no better chart of these tensions than The Gift by Lewis Hyde, a mix of anthropology, economics, and poetic associations. Hyde supported his own art– criticism– with straight jobs as an electrician and carpenter before becoming a teacher. Read it, and keep in mind that music, like air, apparently wants to be free; that playing in the Hollywood sandbox now costs upwards of $100 million dollars; and that some artists make works that exist for just a few minutes before they wash away.

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Second, on Koya-san, the mountain at the center of the Shingon Buddhist universe, scores of monasteries have unimaginably beautiful religious art. I used to live by the foot of the mountain, but I saw little art. My trips up usually ended with ten empty cans and the shakes next to a coffee vending machine. I can’t read Buddhist art well, my own limitation, so I probably got as much out of the coffee as I would have out of the art.

The writer Alex Kerr has a better Koya-san story in his book Lost Japan. He’s taking some friends there (pardon if I misremember parts) from Osaka to show them Traditional Japan. During the train ride, he gripes about the cancerous urban development. Once he arrives, he gripes about the crummy town. Eventually, he lucks into seeing a particularly fine statue of the Buddha. It’s beautiful; he’s moved. The next day he discovers that they only reveal this statue for one day every few hundred years. The rest of the time it stays hidden from everyone, even the monks.

Another Japan observer, Chris Marker, notes in his film Sans Soleil that “censorship is not the mutilation of the show, it is the show.  … It points to the absolute by hiding it.”  He’s reading soft porn, and the Vatican’s treasures, and old Shinto sex totems, but the idea expands past that. One could say it might be better that a work of art not be seen.

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Finally, on some obscure Greek island there’s a movie screen in a field. Robert Beavers, the protege and lover of Gregory Markopoulos, has been following the elder filmmaker’s last wishes and restoring his life’s work for display. On 27-28 June 2008 he will show the final parts of ENIAIOS to those who want to come. Campsites are available.

The site is called the Temenos, and watching these movies thus becomes a pilgrimage. I’ve only seen one; it relied on lush images and classical allusions. I understood only parts. Were I to travel to Lyssaraia to watch the 80-hour film cycle, I would certainly educate myself better, rather than rely on travel to make sure I’m worth what I’m watching.

Of course, Beavers could just upload them all to YouTube so the maximum number of people can watch them while simultaneously downloading porn and getting their scores. Now that we can fit the Complete Works of Humankind on the head of a pin, there’s no reason not to, if it’s just information, another commodity.

But there are different kinds of information. Some asks to be free; some asks to be enclosed. Some is enclosed, in a market, a box in a monastery, or a small community of people with the tools to read and appreciate it. By being so enclosed, it can increase its force, for those able to understand and see it, like water flows faster when it’s focused, like when as kids we put a thumb on the end of a hose and ran through the spray.

I have a long essay about the stellar artist Daisuke NISHIJIMA, written in a haze of flu, in the latest issue of The Comics Journal. It’s online now for subscribers, but for everyone here are a few additional links about this artist:

A couple of Japanese-only sites, with art:

• His official site and blog (Japanese only, but the source of this witch picture, among others).
• His alter ego “Mangacchi” has a blog on the slow life: Mangacchi 2.0
• Actually, it looks like “Mangacchi” has been set to private.  Oops.  I fixed the link for the official site, though.

Awful YouTube has his charming flipbook animation, showing his philosophy of vapor trails.

A couple of interviews:

• Commonsphere Interview, translated into English.
• A 2005 interview by translator Matt Treyvaud, in English.

The French, as usual, are way ahead of us. Nishijima’s French publisher’s page explains that Nishijima is a “grand amateur de musique, et il écrit régulièrement pour des mensuels consacrés à la musique comme Studio Voice ou Music Magazine et il prend le nom de Mahôtsukai, pour ses activités de DJ.”

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From music to movies, Nishijima has an inveterate love of pop culture. His first work, O-son Senso (”The Universal”), riffs on Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds and Neon Genesis Evangelion, the anime TV series. He also tips the pen to:

• Blur’s video for the song “The Universal”
• Superflat.
• Some Hollywood movies: John Carpenter’s The Thing, Rambo, Rocky, like they need links. Like Coca-Cola needs to buy ads.
• The Prisoner (which once had Jack Kirby as its interpreter)

That’s just in his debut volume. Later ones have more riffs; Dien Bien Phu draws extensively from Vietnam War literature and film, particularly the author Tim O’Brien. Nishijima begins the comic with a quote from O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” (link to .pdf), but as always, Nishijima transforms his sources into his own idiom.

Re-reading David B.’s L’Ascension du Haut-Mal (released in English as Epileptic), three images struck me.  The book concerns his family, burdened by his older brother’s crippling seizures; looking for a cure, his parents turned to macrobiotics and metaphysics.  David B. draws liberally on fantasy throughout, mixing childhood perceptions with spiritual maps and strange history.

1. He also includes his childhood art,  not that far removed from his adult work.  All children draw, usually until some too-harsh criticism makes them stop; at a young adolescent stage, they often focus on the detail at the expense of the whole.

This focus also characterizes the art of the mentally ill, repeating intricate patterns like fractals.

2. As the book progresses, the images increasingly give way to diagrams, which mix and flow into the normal world of David B.’s family.  These images, drawn largely from medieval symbology and occultism by modern esoteric sects, show the world as a map, populated by strange creatures.  So do the meridian systems of Traditional Chinese Medicine, as Jean-Christophe is early treated by an acupuncturist.  They echo the scientific progress of mapping the body, always with an eye to control; they never do.

3. Likewise, the adult David B., cocooning himself in lines and meridians, only with his own pattern.

This would have been more substantial, but I’m gobsmacked after receiving today the fourth bill from a random-violence-related emergency room visit. From November! The fourth!

Also, it is due last week.

I want to believe in the free market, but why hasn’t it ground the medical establishment into dust? Everyone I know regards hospitals as a place you go to die, or at least pick up MRSA. Next time I’ll just pay my Chinese doctor fifty bucks to stick needles in my head, even if it’s a sucking chest wound.

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Figure 1.  The Emergency Room. 

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Anyway, spellcheck thinks the article I just finished should be about this:

• Yoshihiro Tatum, from the legendary mange anthology Agro
• translated and edited by Yuji Oink and Adrian Domino
• the artist Mesozoic Furukawa
• Geiger, the “dramatic” version of mange, and:
• the founders of Geiger Studio, like Slouchy Sakurai and Takao Satin, whose violent fantasy Olga 13 now defines “Geiger” more than Tatum’s grim realism.

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Also, I just finished John Nathan’s new memoir, Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere. He has lived a singular life, traipsing to Japan at 22 and soon after translating heavyweights like Yukio MISHIMA and Kenzaburo OE. He makes a memorable cameo with Kobo ABE in the film The Face of Another and became a filmmaker himself, making some classic documentaries. A philosophical, sometimes regretful tone doesn’t change the fact that many of his stories are an utter scream, whether about pitching to Hollywood, Saul Bellow being scum, or fighting with his blind grandmother-in-law.

His translation of Oe’s A Personal Matter helped secure the Nobel, but Nathan has his own voice.  This book was a pleasant surprise, unlike random bills and that dude standing at the top of the escalator at Chinatown Station for those two minutes I was distracted, feeling pretty good about the world.

When Saul Steinberg passed away, we lost one of the greatest cartoonists, one whose virtuoso line work barely kept pace with his intellect. He played with the language of images in still fresh ways. For his subject, he chose America. Its mishmash of high and low cultures suited his talents, especially with the immigrants flowing into mid-century New York. Nonetheless, he never sampled their rich soup of language. What word balloons there were overflowed with drawings, fake calligraphy, or scrawls, nothing more. This linguistic acrobat remained mostly silent.

Thanks to the posthumous volume Reflections and Shadows, Steinberg has broken this silence with an eloquent book-length autobiography. He never conducted a major interview in English during his life, so this volume fills a major void. While written as a prose autobiography, the book represents a series of conversations between Steinberg and his close friend Aldo Buzzi, an Italian architect, publisher, and writer.

Buzzi guided the book’s construction, editing their talks into chapters for Steinberg to approve. While these conversations occurred in the mid-70s, not until 2001 did the Italian edition of this work appear. That’s a long wait, but the book never seems dated. Steinberg’s works maintained a remarkable consistency throughout his career, and the book largely concerns his early life and impressions of the United States.

While much better with cartoons, Steinberg proves an engaging raconteur. The book consists of keenly observed episodes concerning people from his native Romania to the rural Midwest. As an immigrant, he had a fine eye for the minute differences in cultures; as a satirist, he had a keener eye for human foibles. Of the many drawings included, his sketches of his family grow much richer when compared to his descriptions of these people, like the uncle no-one was allowed to talk about, or their smells, each unique.

Nonetheless, Steinberg draws the best portrait of himself.  His favored themes grow clearer in reading, as well as the history that made his work possible in the first place.  Like many Europeans Jews, his strange path out of Europe fascinates.  His went through Italy and prison.  He had been studying architecture, but shortly after the war broke out he was arrested and sent to a refugee camp.  He describes the journey there as full of wonders: when curious girls see him held by the police, he recalls, “For women a prisoner is a romantic, adventurous character, who has done something unlawful and thus might even do something unlawful to them, or rather for them. …Admired and desired by those girls, I felt perfect.”

Just as perfectly observed are his thoughts on food. It lies at the root of culture; one might even say it is culture.  He sums up his homeland’s history in a dish: “the cooking was Jewish, partly Polish-Russian, partly northern Romanian, Hungarian, Austro-Hungarian: paprika, vegetables.”  He finds similar parallels in American restaurants, which he cannot stand, focused as they are on socialization rather than good food.  To his European palate, “gastronomy in America, the restaurants, the taste of the nation are governed by the tastes of children.”  He never speaks so directly in his cartoons.  Here he seems at times like an English gentleman horrified at the colonies.

In the final analysis, Reflections and Shadows works best alongside Steinberg’s drawings and paintings.  It sharpens our understanding of them.  Steinberg may tell a good story, and he certainly has a fascination with words, but he seems uncomfortable relying on them.  Fortunately, this book points to his others, with a bibliography of books and exhibition catalogues. Unfortunately, none remain in print in his adopted country. For an artist of his stature, working for The New Yorker no less, not to have had a major retrospective published soon after his death remains simply baffling. As fine as this book is, it is no substitute.

Soon after I wrote this article, a few years after Steinberg’s death, I bought a used copy of The Inspector. Like the rest of his books, it had been out of print for years. The bookstore’s owner commented that they were getting harder to find, and going up in price, too.

Recently, however, publishers have tried to make up for lost time, with the art book Saul Steinberg: Illuminations in 2006 and a 2005 edition of another collaboration by Buzzi and Steinberg. In this case, it is a The Perfect Egg, a book of Buzzi’s writings on, of all things, food.

(A version of this article originally appeared in The Comics Journal, #258 February 2004)

From my notebook, when I was working in Wakayama, south of Osaka:

I’m fascinated by Touch, but not for its eternal brilliance. It just comes on television every day when I get home from work. This 80s baseball soap, a creaky classic, matches nicely with new commercials for Calorie Mate and Boss Coffee. In a way, the 80s were to anime what the 70s were to manga, mapping the territory for everyone to follow. Touch, with its love triangle, high school tensions, and pop songs, could be any tv show from the 80s. Given that kids still watch it, it could be every tv show since.

Since I’m usually cooking when it’s on, I can’t say how the love triangle’s progressing. In fact, I can’t even tell whether they’re showing the episodes in order. They all run together: school, practice and games, tiffs large and small, life-changing teen drama. Sometimes I feel that five different scenes shoot out of a blender every day—there’s your show. In the episode where Punchy’s two illegitimate kids show up (he’s the dog, mind), in between slow-motion shots of Minami doing gymnastics and the baseball coach’s bobbing head, there’s an old school montage of baseball practice. The kids run, hit some balls, and hit the field like nothing else exists. It goes into the night, but it could go on forever.

This montage lifts the practice above the story, where it becomes an emblem of sorts. Touch does have a story arc, with twin boys both in love with Minami, both on a team headed inexorably to Koshien Stadium for the championship. The outcome is inevitable, and not the reason anyone watches. Rather, we watch to see the same thing every week, to see just a little progress without making it end, like everything in our lives eventually does. I finish cooking, turn off the television and the next day go back to school. Repeat.

Why not, then, a 26-episode series in which the road is clearly defined but the progress never told? It could work quite well, even as a thirteen hour loop played forever and only watched five minutes at a time. We don’t recall the long days and adjustments after, say, our first confession of love. We recall the excruciating buildup before we spilled our hearts out of our chests, terrified they wouldn’t make it out there on their own. We recall life on the edge of the cliff, right before you lose balance, knowing you won’t be able to pull back but enjoying every unmeasured moment.

He is quite adamant on the question of whether society owes the artist a living; he feels it does not.  He urges young artists to structure their finances in such a way that they do not have to rely on the sale of their art… Irwin does not subscribe to the sackcloth-and-ashes school of artistic romanticism; he sees no special virtue in staying in garrets.

Later:

During the mid- and late sixties, Irwin was supplementing his meager art income in part through his teaching, but that only for a few years at a time.  His principal source of income was playing the horses.

…”I think the race track was probably, in terms of discipline and learning, one of the most important activities I ever had,” he explained.  … “The thing about the race track is the incredibly wide range of information that has a bearing.  If you’re going to have a chance there, you have to achieve the discipline necessary for keeping track of all of it.  The one thing more than anything else is learning to pay attention.  Because every year it’s different; even during the period of a meet it will go through cycles or phases.  It’s real tough to put your finger on it, but the name of the game is to sense the upcoming tilt before anyone else does, to notice the particular combination that’s beginning to gel before anyone else notices it.  And to do that, you have to pay attention to everything.”

From Chapter 12, “Playing the Horses,” in Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin, apparently to be rereleased in October 2008.  Still one of the best books on art I know.

Stu called from Toronto last night to make fun of my country’s asinine health care system, so I had to respond by forwarding a bunch of Kate Beaton comics. Take that, Canadian!

I love her work. It is hilarious, full of in-jokes for the historically astute that will make you laugh regardless. She has a marvelous sense of the absurd– Napoleon eating cookies is always funny– and exact timing.

Often enough her comics are about identity, focusing on her origins or a country’s. As a hick, I can relate to her strips about being a from the sticks. Her “Conversations with a Younger Self” also delve into her identity. They show grownup Kate and child Kate, blaming each other for screwing up their life. Her two History Comics series contain her finest work yet, with a gag mixing Dr. Naismith with his creation’s future. The gags are always rooted deeply in fact, so the absurdities don’t seem cheap.

Best of all, she can just plain draw. Her vibrant line that reminds me of Steig, and she slides effortlessly between figuration and doodling, often in the same strip. She draws Georgiana Babbage quite foxily indeed, and Elizabeth I as a furious mound of circles. Her characters’ hands are especially nice, going from squiggles to realistic depending on the comic’s needs.

Most comics I’ve read on the web last in my mind no longer than the light they’re printed on. Beaton’s will have a place on my shelf, should they ever make the leap to print. In the meantime, she could adopt the same model as other web cartoonists. I don’t want to live in a world where she can’t make a living off t-shirts of her first panel of Anges MacPhail. (Should I live in that world, and so fall ill, please Lord let it not be in the US of A.)